More on the the Humble Arts Foundation

(Dana Miller)

Since Julian Thomas linked in for me to the picture he had in one of the Humble Foundation's group shows, I've been able to hunt around the work of a lot of the photographers they are dealing with and their work.

(Matt Lucas)


(Andrea Chu)

There's some very good stuff hidden in there - a much better selection of new work - imo - than at many other venues. Someone certainly has a good eye and it's a pretty good cross-section of people to keep an eye on. Good stuff . In fact, it's great if they can continue showing and supporting this kind of work.

(Meredith Allen)

Okay, and I've got to ask - apart from the emails I've recently started getting from them, has everyone else been seeing these monthly shows for ages as they come along and I've been living in some kind of bubble..?

(Adi Lavy)

(Bryan Schneide)

5B4 - Photography and Books

Time to point to a new blog - 5B4 - a blog a bout photo books. It's pretty prolific so far, so I hope the author can keep it up.

There are a lot of quite in depth reviews, and an eclectic selection of books.

A few of my favourites so far - a selection of books about Walker Evans at work

Swiss Policeman Arnold Odermatt's (who I talked about here) new book On Duty

And John Davies The British Landscape

But there's also Laura Letinsky, Tony Ray Jones, Friedlander and many more.

And the writing about books is good - here's a sample from the Odermatt review:

"Armed with Rolliflex cameras and color film, Odermatt “documents” his buddies laying speed traps on highways, looking over files of fingerprints, taking part in water rescue scenarios, and investigating car accidents. I say “documents” because most of the images are staged. The participants literally acted out moments from their daily routine under Odermatt’s direction.

All members of the force are in on the fun and are obviously having a great time playing their individual parts in these small photo plays. Their postures and poses indicate their “ideal” image of what they must actually look like when performing these duties in real life. This creates a sense of stiffness in the photos. It is as if the individual personality of each man has been removed and we are left with a group of law enforcing automatons. This quality adds a great deal of humor to these images.

Even though the acting may be stiff, or Odermatt’s ability to direct people is poor, he is a hell of a natural photographer. These images use the vocabulary of advertising images with their clear and sharp descriptions and enticing color palette, but are often so well made that they are not of the lowest common denominator. Odermatt uses all of the information in the frame to his advantage. These are not just pictures where the subject dominates and the rest of the frame or background description is left without regard. From foreground to background, side to side and top to bottom, these frames are masterfully constructed.

Often we are faced with the absurd. Whether conscious of it or not, Odermatt has a flair for organization and timing that creates an absurdist humor or drama to some of the photos. In one, a man aims a machine gun while wearing full protective vest and head covering while in the background a neon blue water pitcher (the brightest color in the frame) mocks the shape of the head covering and the barrel of the gun. In another photo, two chalk outlines of cars are left alone on the road and look as if they themselves have skidded and crashed into one another."

Of course, you are probably going to end up buying more books...

Michael Wesely... oh, no, it's not

At first glance, these "Netropolis" pictures look to be Michael Wesely's, of the reconstruction of Berlin, re-modelling of MoMA - but they aren't.

In fact they're by Michael Najjar (a funky if slightly annoying website...). He has a lot of other stuff on his site - most of it a lot slicker and some rather more conceptual (I rather like the idea of his Iraq pictures, but not quite their execution)

Back to Netropolis, whereas Wesely produced his pictures from a fixed point with long or multiple exposures, Najjar takes multiple images and combines them:

"The complexity of the city is visually apparent in Michael Najjar's multi-layered photographic prints. Like Fritz Lang whose 1926 film Metropolis envisioned the futuristic city, Najjar’s Netropolis series carries the notion a step further, positing the city as a locus of computer networks and digital information. In Netropolis/Shanghai, 2003, he photographed from the tallest building in the city of Shanghai. Using a conventional camera, Najjar shot to the north, south, east and west. These images were converted to digital files and combined into a single image that was manipulated on the computer. In the final stage the work is converted back and produced as a traditional silver gelatin print. The resulting image gives the viewer a sense of seeing through time".

(There are more detailed descriptions of his work on the website - but it's all Flash junk)

What exactly is the humble arts foundation?

I started getting emails from the humble arts foundation (barely a capital letter to be found on their site) as a result, I think, of this blog.

Informing me of their shows and projects. They have a website up with some information "about us" and their founder Amani Olu. And some of the photography is quite interesting - Amy Stein for one has been up in their shows.

But I'm still not entirely certain who (or perhaps better what) they are.

"a not for profit organisation that seeks to advance the careers of emerging photographers by providing grants, professional support, and exhibition and publication opportunities...". The internet in one way or another seems to have encouraged a number of these sorts of ventures (they often seem to revolve around Flickr in some way). None quite exactly the same, but most apparently philanthropic in some way towards artists. Jason Fulford of J+L Books would be another example - a publishing house run as a not-for-profit (or at least it was last time I looked). Some more overtly capitalist (such as Jen Bekman?). It sounds good - certainly good for artists and photographers- and I certainly hope it is.

Now I'm not suggesting their anything nefarious about all this, just that my Late Baby Boomer/Sputnik Generation brain is having a bit of trouble wrapping itself around it all... But I'm left with a little feeling of mystery about it all. Who is getting what out of it? The artists I hope. I'm also wondering about the success of them - it must be something of an uphill struggle to get something of this nature going and keeping momentum.

But if all this good stuff is the case, then I'm all for them!

POSTSCRIPT - rather than post this in the comments, which nobody ever reads, I'll post this here. First, Julian Thomas made a helpful comment about Humble 9see comments). And also Jon Feinstein from Humble responded:

Thanks for blogging about us. I completely understand the mystery of it all. With so many "organizations", blogs etc popping up left and right I think it is completely fair to view some with skeptisism. Our main goal is to gain further exposure for photographers we work with, whether it be through publications like STORY, online press, online and physical group shows, or grant opportuities (coming in the fall--stay tuned!)... ,Jon Feinstein Curatorial Director

Julian's recommendation is good value for one thing...

And it wasn't my intention that the post come across a skeptical or even cynical - more captiously curious (maybe from having been burned by "art" start-ups in the past...) but certainly a genuine curiosity about how this is all being fuelled (hopefully sustainably) - I'm guessing lots of youthful energy among other things? All the more so in an age when artists are being asked to plonk more and more dough on the table (reviews, curatorial" competitions", publication) - $40, $50 $60 or more just to get someone to look at their work - which I actually notice an absence of at Humble so far. And it certainly looks good. The more of this kind of thing that "on the side of the artist" the better imo

POST-POSTSCRIPT... Just for Julian, here's one curator's take on Portfolio Reviews:

...they had entered into an informal partnership, planning regular portfolio reviews and inviting curators, editors, art buyers, agents, and gallery owners to be the reviewers. Neither had lofty expectations about discovering the new cutting edge of art photography in the process, and occasionally it all began to seem like a terrible waste of the photographers’ money and the reviewers’ time; on the upside, though, there was a fair amount of networking amongst the reviewers, and a few additional collaborations sprang up out of it. A. and J. spent their lunch breaks discussing current exhibitions, ideas for various projects, and their own careers...

Mark Klett's Rephotographics

"We now view landscape photographs, both past and present, much like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave. They are artifacts of what we think we know about the land, and how we have come to know it." Mark Klett.

Klett is now apparently beyond his Rephotographic Survey Project, the re-photographing the work of the likes of O'Sullivan and W.H. Jackson on the various historic Western Surveys, and on to a re-re-photographic project, what he calls the Third View





I find I really want to like Klett's work but have a hard time completley doing so. The original RSP project was a fine and innovative idea, as well as something of a reaction to the New Topographics movement of the same era (although I must say I think the two groups actually have more in common than they like to admit).





But at times it all seems like a good idea pushed a bit too far to the Nth degree. The rephotographing of Muybridge's historic panorama of San Francisco sounds like a good idea on paper - but I don't feel it quite worked. And the Third View seems much more valuable to the participants than as a wider, more public work. Indeed, Klett explicit likens it to field work with students as with other disciplines such as anthropology or archeology. And in truth, we all know that the value of much of the student work on such trips are often mainly educational - and that Professors easily get bogged down and prevented from following their own course of research as rigorously as they could or should. There is a sense as well that it is trying to adopt a sort of scientific methodology for the project, but without abandoning the chance and poetry such photographic endeavours generate - but that it somehow doesn't always manage to get the best of both worlds. (either way, the Third View website has lots of interactive stuff on it that you can hunt around and enjoy).





And yet despite all this, there are many of Klett's individual images that I really rather like - occasionally whole sequences. His project Ideas About Time, for example (I'm not sure if that may be one of the personal projects that is pursued alongside the "official" survey work of the Third View work?). In fact, apart from the general essence of the original RSP, I find it is Klett's more personal work that appeals to me.




Photoeye has a gallery of quite a number of his images, with links to his books. I also came across an interesting essay on his work - a few quotes:

"...But perhaps the greatest conceptual achievement of the Rephotographic Survey Project, with their seemingly affectless pairs of images, was to create stereo "photographs" in the fourth dimension, their exposure time a virtual century. The real interest of these pairs is typically the space in-between, where all the changes occurred, or failed to. Are the housing developments and highways that appear, and the mines that occasionally disappear, developments or depredations? From the point of view of a century, the distinction begins to dissolve. Sometimes the absence of change is most salient. On isolated mountainsides the positions of individual rocks can be compared across what is, after all, only a blink in geologic time.

In one of his most deftly tongue-in-cheek tales, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," the twentieth-century Symbolist poet whose magnum opus consisted in the precise recreation, in flawless seventeenth-century Spanish, of select chapters from Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel, Don Quixote. "He did not want to compose another Don Quixote--which would be easy--but the Don Quixote." This was not to be a matter of copying, either. "His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide--word for word and line for line--with those of Miguel de Cervantes." Needless to say, he did not bother to reread the "original" first--that would be child's play. His goal, rather, was to discover whether a seventeenth-century literary masterpiece could be written in the twentieth century. Or, in Menard's own words, "I have contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work." Because of the irony of this circumstance, Borges's narrator in sists, "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." Indeed, he goes so far as to venture, "I often imagine that he finished and that I am reading Don Quixote--the entire work--as if Menard had conceived it."

Klett had also contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally what his predecessors did spontaneously, and in doing so he has enriched the historical record with countless ironies. (Not least of them, as Verburg wrote in Second View, was that, "Unlike our predecessors, we did not take what we thought would be appealing shots." ) In the context of this oddly Borgesian enterprise, the question naturally arose, what would it be to conceive a photographic survey of the American West today, when the frontier is long closed and none of the original purposes--assessing the land's mineral wealth and its potential for defense and development--can realistically be served, but the consequences of these projects are more or less apparent? As it was for Menard, copying was the path to creation for Klett. The way to mount a latter-day photographic survey of the West that would not simply prove received assumptions about land use (like so much of the New Topographics work against which the RSP chafed) was to copy the classics, word for word, knowing the inflections would be new with the passage of time. Never mind that the nineteenth-century surveys, led by scientists like Clarence King or military men like George Wheeler, were not strictly photographic surveys--they were geographical and geological surveys that took photographers along. The RSP never followed the routes of the original survey parties for long--instead they honed in on the photographers they admired and followed in their footsteps, willfully begging the question of how much agency these individuals had. By repeating views, they established that O'Sullivan in particular was not above twisting his camera dramatically to make natural conditions, like the slant of a hillside, conform to his ideals of wildness. They brought the historical record to life, putting it in the hands of working photographers..."

and of course, there's always the Twin Peaks rephotographic project...

The Scene of the Crime - Julian Thomas

After jotting down my thoughts recently about photography, traces, evidence, crime scenes and so on, it had completely slipped my mind the Julian Thomas has a series called Scene of the Crime which I really rather like. Among many other things they capture a certain English melancholy - there is also something foreboding about them.

Julian also has it "published" by Democratic Books. You can download the pdf and print it yourself - pretty neat. It was actually the pdf I came across downloaded ages ago on my computer when I was searching for something else. Now I have time, I'm going to print it out.

For those who have suffered times of emotional or psychological illness, recovery is a slow process. A major difficulty lies in the fact that the site of the problem is the body, but nothing can be touched, healed, or removed. One becomes a combination of victim, judge, jury and detective. 'Getting better' is a process of stumbling through images from the past and trying to make sense of a collection of often seemingly unrelated fragments

At some point in the recovery process, you have to go back - back to the scene of the crime. The images in this series are an account of such a return. They are clues, totems, representations of emotions, symbols, dialogues, inner narratives, and sometimes, fragments from nightmares.

You can also look through more images on Julian's site.

Gursky yet again...

After my brief bout of Gursky dissing yesterday I came across Chris Jones' view of the Gursky show/new work on his blog (Chris is a Canadian photographer living and studying in London).

So, an alternate viewpoint:

"Lend Me Your Retina

The White Cube opened a new show of Andreas Gursky's photographs on Thursday. It is powerful stuff, an experience of sheer retinal overload and visual opulence. The pictures are even bigger than before, approaching bill board size. The image above is of a massive water tank / neutrino observatory; the scale becomes obvious only when one notices the two small boats in the lower right.

A lot could (and maybe will) be written about the work's dependence on the retina. The force with which the image presents itself to the viewer now obscures whatever currency Gursky's images used to have as documents of global cultural landscapes. The spectacle in each photograph is amplified to a point where it disengages from a discourse about representation. His image of Pyongyang..., for example, contributes little to a discussion of developments in the East, in the way that Edward Burtynsky's images of China do. It is a matter of visual spectacle. This point is a fulcrum, upon which the viewer's art experience will balance or fall...

This has to do with Gursky's use of the potential of digital technologies to achieve his vision. To begin with, he approaches images now, as most photographer artists do, without the constraints of the frame. Images are constructed using various instances or perspectives, assembled into a final frame, but coming from many. This is representative of how in the age of digital new media, the traditional notion of the image has become obsolete. The frame has been exploded, images become programmable.

...This image (of the "James Bond" islands) is a composite of many pictures taken of various islands. Some islands appear in the image twice, but from different perspectives. The resulting assemblage has an uncanny balance, because the perspectives are not quite perfect, and our eyes are very attuned to this." more here

I'm interested in ways of blasting a way through the perspectivism that holds photography in it's grip. I'm not quite sure that was Gursky's intent in this case, and without seeing the (massive) works first hand, I'm not sure if it manages to do it.

Charlotte Cotton moves to LACMA

Charlotte Cotton, who recently wrote the interesting essay The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White is moving to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as department head and curator of photography.

Cotton, who is a Brit, 36, studied at the hotbed of British photography at the Brighton University and was then a curator at the Victoria & Albert for twelve years, then at the Photographers Gallery in London, before moving tho Art + Commerce in NY.

Cotton has also written a very good book The Photograph as Contemporary Art. As the LA Times puts it, Cotton is from outside the set of usual US curators who tend to move from museum to museum on a single track.

"Charlotte's career bridges the traditional and the contemporary. That is her real strength," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "At the Victoria & Albert, she dealt with a collection of some 30,000 photographs that has great 19th century and early 20th century material, so she had a real grounding in a big museum collection and historic work. Then she gave it up to experiment and learn more about photography in the contemporary world. She has had huge experience, and she has taken risks. That's a good combination."...

"Charlotte is articulate and thoughtful, young and sensitive," Govan said. "She has a lot of her career ahead of her. Part of my interest in her is curiosity about what she would do with all that. When I met with her, it was clear that she had a real passion not just to be in a major museum, but to be in Los Angeles. That in itself seemed like such a right fit. It wasn't just the museum; it was that Los Angeles was such a fantastic place to explore questions of photography's changing role."

This is a pretty good move for LACMA and photography on the West Coast in general. LACMA has a reputation for being rather less stuffy than many other museums, and this builds on that. Exciting possibilities. For my money, Cotton is one of the more forward thinking curators and critics of photography out there right now.

Adobe Acrobat 8 - rolled in by a dung beetle...

I used to have a full version of Acrobat 5 or 6, but it seemed like it wasn't tying up with all the new Acrobat options so I tried installing the trial version of Acrobat 8

What a bloated piece of crap!

Back to Acrobat 6 now...

Is Gursky spent?

(Note - see the follow up post here)

I took the latest Modern Painters with me to read at the cottage a while back, optimistically thinking that with a 3 and a 5 year old, the lake ice just melted, bugs, frogs, porcupines and bunnies everywhere, dead-falls to clear and plumbing to fix I would actually have time to read it...




So, I finally got down to reading the glowing article on the new Gursky work yesterday (there's also a good little piece on Boris Mikhailov). And today I find a link at Winkleman to a somewhat (though not entirely) critical review in New York Magazine - "It’s Boring at the Top" - of the new Gursky show at the Matthew Marks Gallery (and here):

Is Andreas Gursky—the highest-priced photographer alive—running out of ideas?

The German über-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist. He excelled at portraying the border-to-border, edgeless hum and busy obliviousness of modern life, what Francis Fukuyama ridiculously declared “the end of history,” George W.S. Trow called “The Context of No Context,” and Rem Koolhaas dubbed “Junkspace.” Not only did Gursky seem to be critical of all this, but his handsome images of trading floors, hotel lobbies, raves, and landscapes were charged with a visual force and intellectual rigor that let you imagine that you were gleaning the grand schemes and invisible rhythms of commerce and consumption. His amazing picture of a convenience store brimming with goods, 99 Cent II, Diptych (2001), which recently became the most expensive photo in history when it was auctioned for over $3.3 million, fizzed like cherry cola but packed the formal power of a Monet.

Unfortunately, as smart and deft as this artist still is, that fizz has gone flat, the power has run low, the former buzz has become a drone. The times have changed, but Gursky is still trying to render purring pre-9/11 space, where commerce ticked along without an undercurrent of fear. But his rigor and criticality have been replaced by grandiosity and theatricality; figures feel frozen; compositions are stagy; structure devolves into carpet like pattern. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform. He’s such a serious artist that this amphetamine is singular enough to sometimes offset the deadening effects so that his pictures occasionally impart a poetics of numbness and stupefaction...

...Gursky has digitally pieced together numerous shots from various locations, including his studio, making F1 less a photograph than an invention, and what’s tedious about it is how coyly self-referential it is. Directly above the pit crews are onlookers in a glassed-in observation deck. Many of these folks take photos; a few have their hands against the clear surface of the skybox. Thus, the frontality of the image and the idea of multiple views of one subject is stressed. Standing between the crews is a sexy blonde in lace-up leather stilettos, hot pants, and a skull on her low-slung belt buckle, which is conveniently positioned almost at the center of the picture. Is Gursky implying that men are drones and women are merely saints, sluts, sirens, or fodder for fashion photography, cheesecake, and pornography? Or maybe he’s admitting that he’s out of ideas.

In this I tend to agree on the whole. I remember the excitement when I first encountered Gursky's work - leafing through the books and articles several times - renewed when I saw my first massive Gurskys at the Tate Modern, but I haven't felt the same rush for some time now, while still enjoying - and being inspired by - that first big section of work. What now it seems? As Ed Winkleman says in a slightly different context "He used to be so bleeding edge, and now he's really just riding that wave, churning out signature work with a seasonal/fashionable update every so often."...



BTW, for my money, Thomas Struth's less flamboyant working away at his various projects is still bearing fruit and seems to have much more staying power. Though I also hope Grusky gets his rhythm back and gets back in the groove with something new and good - there is still something about his work - even this new stuff - that can mesmerise you.





POSTSCRIPT: I notice Joerg at Conscientious has picked up on the comments about the new Gursky show (which, of course, almost none of us have seen first hand...). He seems a little worried that we are in danger of treating artists like entertainers. Leaving aside for now the strong argument that could be made that regarding artists as entertainers is nothing new and sometimes appropriate, I want to compare the response to Gursky's new work with that to Thomas Struth's new Museum work. Struth takes an old theme of his - people and museums - and works it deeper and more effectively. On the whole the reviews of Struth's new work have been positive (extremely positive in many cases) - Adrian Tyler just described the Prado show to me as "exquisite", but Struth is essentially doing the same thing here as Gursky in terms of artistic process. Expanding the work of an existing them. Yet as far as I can tell, Struth seems to been much more successful at doing so.

I mentioned the Modern Painters review of the Gursky work - I came away from it empty. It very much felt as though the writer was having to go through all sorts of convolutions using ancient Chinese concepts of blandness (which in itself might be an interesting thread to follow) and quoting Barthes in order to try an justify Gursky's work. Indeed I'm sure the Gursky work is impressive first hand. I'm just getting the feeling it isn't as good as what he's done before and is a bit of a misstep.

Finally the Guardian, while slightly more restrained about the Gursky work, was not exactly enthusiastic:

...In his most recent work, Gursky has employed digital technology, resulting in even more crisp detail as well as the potential to manipulate the image. Kamiokande (2007) portrays an underground chamber designed to detect the smallest-known particles in the universe, the extraordinary architecture and scale of the chamber determined only by two tiny figures at the bottom of the picture. Elsewhere, the extraordinary natural poeticism of the James Bond Island images seduce, even as you try to spot Daniel Craig in his swimming trunks.

Gursky has visited Japan, Thailand and Korea in preparation for this show, apparently in pursuit of new subject matter to satisfy the potential of new technology. It makes you nostalgic for the ordinary everydayness of his earlier work, whose honesty seems to have been lost in the quest for the more extraordinary image.

Richard Mosse, Phillips Explorer 8x10 and Thomas Struth

This post isn't quite the mishmash it appears to be from the title...

I'm reluctantly selling my lovely little Phillips Explorer 8x10 (starving artist mode for the next few months - gotta buy film and feed the kids...). It's up on ebay and I ended up getting an email about the sale from a young Irish photographer Richard Mosse who is studying at Yale.

I found his website and it turns out he has some funky stuff up there. I'll be interested to see how his work develops over time.

Oh - and Richard also told me that Thomas Struth gave a talk at Yale recently and when asked, replied he uses a Phillips Explorer - aww man - did he have to tell me that - talk about separation anxiety...

(this last picture - Struth - from Paradise)

China Watch update

(FENG Bin)

I recently mentioned some of the photographers emerging out of China and being noticed in the West. As a result of FotoFest Beijing, Chinese photographers seem to be on everyone's radar - and rightly so imo - I find all this "new" (to most of us anyway) photography pretty exciting.

(SHUM Dustin)

Joerg (who has been tracking Chinese photographers for some time now) has a good selection of links.

(Birdhead)

Photoeye/Photoeye Galleries is involved with the website linked above "new Internet platform for contemporary Chinese photography"

(LUO Dan)

There's definitely some good stuff in all this


(LI yu)

Kodak Duabubble lens at Coney Island

Cool - okay, so I have a love hate relationship with Flickr (well, closer to hate hate...). As Martin Parr said, there's an awful lot of rubbish to wade through to find anything half decent. There's a side of me that enjoys this playign around with clunky/funky old lenses (or almost lenses) and obscure processes

Via Joe Reifer, this few picture by J.E. Piper. Piper (aka Raven Cat.. those Flickr names are one of the things that are like chalk on a blackboard for me...) says:

"Experimenting with photo processes from the 1840's, and a homemade camera that has a Kodak Duaflex viewfinder glass "bubble" as the lens. This is my first attempt, looking up at a tree outside my window."

Along with one from his Camera Obscura with Magnifying Glass Lens. I'm going to keep watching for more.

The naked truth about Tunick

From the Grauniad (Guardian) Art & Architecture blog - The naked truth about Tunick:

Criticise a popular artist like Spencer Tunick and you're inevitably accused of snobbery, but I'll come clean - I really don't believe anyone can mistake his sensationalism for art.

Tunick has just persuaded 18,000 people to strip off in Mexico City, for the latest in a series of mass nude photo shoots around the world. Well, good for him. He's got the publicity, and the participants doubtless enjoyed themselves, maybe even found it therapeutic.

But so what? Tunick's work isn't art, and no one who actually considered it for a moment would say it was. There's no interesting "thought" underlying his work nor is it a provocative challenge to what art is. His photograph-stunts are on the same level as a wacky advertising campaign. I find it contemptible the way Tunick is applauded for something so blatantly cynical.

I think many people secretly hate art. Not so long ago, it was perfectly respectable to express that loathing, at least for modern art, but nowadays art takes such a prominent role in our culture that most people feel obliged to pay lip service to it - yet the old loathing survives under the surface..." more - go add a comment

I'd pretty much have to agree. It's Christo without the class..